In the mobile radio telecommunications field, it is widely understood that a wireless signal will often propagate between a transmitter and a receiver via several paths. The components arriving at the receiver via different paths are commonly referred to as multipath components and they may interfere with one another at the receiver leading to a degradation of the receiver's performance.
Various schemes exist for addressing the problem of multipath propagation. Often, these techniques rely on a determination of the relative time offsets between multipath components or, in other words, some measure of the difference in the propagation time for the signals travelling along the different paths. Often, the process of determining the existence of signal components arriving at a receiver via different paths and the time offsets between them is called a multipath search. Typically, the number of, and relative delays between, such components will vary over time, as will the amplitude and phase of each such component.